According to a new IDG research survey, the C-suite is more engaged today than any time prior in decisions related to data centers. The top reasons cited by executives for that involvement include cyber-security, cost efficiencies, compliance and risk mitigation. What is revealing from this research is that nearly 9 out of 10 top-level executives are engaged in making data center decisions for their companies.
When asked, virtually all CEOs/CxOs participating in the IDG study cited their involvement with business risk, capital efficiencies, and operational expertise. Today, the majority of data center deployed applications are mission critical for enterprises as they consider business attributes such as brand, revenue, capital, and customer services.
Nearly two-thirds of the survey respondents said they house their data in co-located data center facilities. Co-located data centers remain popular with the C-suite as 83% of C-level decision makers plan to move their data center operations to a third-party colocation data center facility in the near future.
“C-Level execs said their top concerns about their data centers are tied to security and uptime,” said Ernest Sampera, CMO of vXchnge. “We’re seeing more C-level executives involved in strategic and day-to-day data center operations decisions that are critical in protecting their brands and companies’ successes.”
Other important findings from the study, which was commissioned by vXchnge, included the following:
Primary reasons why companies switch data center locations:
Uptime – 47% of C-level respondents cited uptime as the primary reason
- Improved security/risk management – 43%
- Better regulatory compliance – 40%
- Re-engineering core business processes – 17%
Data center outage times are also a concern
Sixty-eight percent of C-level respondents noted their companies experienced an outage between 1 and 60 minutes, 14 percent reported outages of more than 1 to 5 hours and more than 14% noted outages of 5 to 12-plus hours.
Data center decisions will continue to be a key concern for CEOs as mission-critical operations are running in on- and off-premise locations. With outages and data breaches a constant topic in the news cycle, C-level executives must answer to their boards and guard from reputation damage and full-force brand protection.
